What: “Evolution, Cuisine and Romance,” a discussion of the co-evolution of diet, sexual strategies, and society with anthropologist Greg Laden. Cafe Scientifique is a happy-hour forum devoted to science and culture, sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History.

Anthropologist Greg Laden theorizes that early humans paired up because of food.

BY MAJA BECKSTROM

Pioneer Press

Laden is an independent anthropologist who has worked mainly in Africa and is also a science blogger and adviser with the University of Minnesota’s College of Continuing Education.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s a peek at a hypothesis he helped develop on the evolution of cuisine and romance, which he’ll share next week during an informal discussion at Bryant-Lake Bowl in Minneapolis as part of the U’s Cafe Scientifique.

Recent advances in genetics have helped us understand more about how modern humans evolved from our ancestral hunter-gatherer forebears and migrated out of Africa. Laden and his colleagues are concerned with what happened even earlier, about 2 million years ago, when our hominid ancestor Homo erectus appeared. This new early human was much bigger and had a bigger brain than his chimp-like predecessors. The question, we asked Laden, is why?

A. The mainstream explanation for Homo erectus getting big is (they were) hunting animals and eating meat. We’re saying, no. It’s all about plants and cooking. What we’re saying is hugely different than the prevailing explanation.

Q. What do you think happened?

A. The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living off raw plant foods and probably doing a bit of hunting like chimpanzees do now.

And then, somebody discovers the ability to control fire. Everybody argues about when this happened. We’re saying it happened about 2 million years ago. Suddenly, all this food that was previously poisonous or indigestible becomes edible. We’re talking about grass seeds, like wheat. And tubers. The amount of energy available to these early human ancestors goes up a huge amount. So, they get bigger. At the same time, their jaws get smaller, which is supported by the fossil record.

Q. So, cooking lets them eat more nutritious food. But how does that affect their social life?

A. The first thing to understand is that the ancestors of humans were probably a lot like today’s living chimpanzees. And there are a few things important to note about chimpanzee society. All male chimpanzees are dominant over all female chimpanzees, with few exceptions. When two chimpanzees are together and one has food, the dominant chimpanzee is going to take away the food.

The stupidest idea a chimpanzee could ever have is to grab a piece of fruit from a tree and walk around with it all day, because it will eventually run into another chimp who will take it and eat it. To put it simply, they do not share.

So, we can imagine a scenario where you have these early human females gathering the food and then processing it. (It may or may not be true that it’s just females. But in all modern hunter-gatherer societies, females do the food processing.) But if you don’t eat the food you gather immediately, if you are going to cook it, then the dominant individuals can come and take your food. We think that male and female pairs could have evolved to protect from theft from other individuals, a sort of proto-marriage. We’re saying that it’s not just the discovery of cooking that was an important evolutionary step, but the discovery of cooking and sharing.

Q.Your published paper points out that females would have competed for the best food guards and would have formed ongoing relationships with these male “co-defenders.” What’s the evidence to support this idea?

A. Chimpanzee males are way bigger than female chimpanzees. But among early humans, males and females are roughly the same size. And we know that when males and females are roughly the same size, it’s a sign of pair bonds, lifelong pair bonds. Male elephant seals are triple the size of females. Male gorillas are also much larger than females, and these animals are all polygamous. But male and female gibbons, for example, are the same size and have pair bondings. So, monogamy and same-sized males and females are linked throughout mammal species.

We’re suggesting that the same size of early male and female humans was a signal of a change in the social structure – a shift from a polygamous chimp-like structure to a social structure where males and females form pairs.

What evolved was the capacity for humans to modulate and negotiate rather than act immediately, like chimps, on their desires for sex and for food. These strong bonds formed between pairs and allowed one to take a risk to benefit both of them.

Q.Since you and your colleagues first proposed the hypothesis in 1999, it has been criticized as “anthropological folklore” by some and by others as “wishful thinking.” There is criticism, for example, that there is little to no archaeological evidence to suggest that humans could control fire as early as 2 million years ago.

A. It’s certainly not the dominant idea. But it’s worked its way into mainstream thinking as an alternative. Some textbooks on evolution now contain this hypothesis. My personal feeling about it is that it’s a good hypothesis, and it might be true. Pair bonding among humans is real and we have to explain it. Its importance to our species is undeniable. Cooking is important, too. The idea that these two things are linked, I think is a really good idea.

Q.What do you have planned for Valentine’s Day?

A. Well, it’s my wife’s birthday, so we’ll celebrate.

Q. Will you cook her dinner?

A. Let me put it this way, if people in my house eat a cooked meal, it’s because I cooked it.

Maja Beckstrom can be reached at mbeckstrom @pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5295.

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